1. Intro to cultural studies
Sarah & Meg
What is cultural studies?
Stuart Hall: encoding/decoding
Script-writing exercise

2. CULTURAL STUDIES Guiding questions:
Whose voices, identities and experiences most often get communicated in mainstream media?
Whose do not?
Whose interests does this serve?
How & why does this matter?

3. “Cultural studies is animated by subjectivity and power; how human subjects are formed and how they experience cultural and social space.”
“By looking at how culture is used and transformed by “ordinary” and “marginal” social groups, cultural studies sees people not simply as consumers, but as potential producers of new social values and cultural languages.”

4. “The processes that make us – as individuals, as citizens, as members of a particular class, race or gender – are cultural processes that work precisely because they seem so natural, so unexceptional, so irresistible.”
“Popular culture is a site where the construction of everyday life may be examined. The point of doing this is not only academic – that is, as an attempt to understand a process or practice – it is also political, to examine the power relations that constitute this form of everyday life and thus to reveal the configuration of interests its construction serves.”

5. Britain in 1960’s and 1970’s
Disenfranchisement of working class & growing sense that mainstream culture wasn’t for them  PUNK

6. NYC in the 1980’s
Economic warfare against Black communities

7. TEXTS are a site of personal identity formation and political struggle

8. What’s a text?
Anything that carries meaning
powerpoints - photographs - memes - snapchats - movies - videogames - websites - books – tweets – comics - tv shows - posters – clothes – devices - built environments - podcasts - music - prepared food - events

9. Political economy
Cultural studies
Considers…
Systems
Practices
Analyzes…
Labor
(economic relations)
Texts
(meanings)
Power happens through…
Who owns what
(capital)
Media representations (ideology)
Archvillain is…

10. One of the founders of cultural studies
Stuart Hall
February 3, 1932 to February 10, 2014
One of the founders of cultural studies
Marx(ian) understanding of power +
linguistic understanding of language’s unfixed meanings

11. Marxist conceptual framework:
history = a struggle between those who own the means of production (and also the media) vs those who work for them
For Hall, this becomes a struggle over MEANING

12. Hall: texts and language mediate our relationship to the world…
...there is power in representing the world a certain way, but that power is not absolute
“representations of violence on the TV screen are not violence but messages about violence...
but we have continued to research the question of violence, for example, as if we were unable to comprehend this epistemological distinction.” (Hall, p. 166)

13. Critique of the then-dominant paradigm of communication research: “media effects” model

14. In between the “message” and its “effects” is a whole series of layers:
Prior experiences
Our identity; who we are in the world
Broader culture and ideology (the lenses through which we examine the world)
E.g. INTERPRETATION.

15. SEMIOTICS
The study of symbols and their relationship to the world
“The articulation of an arbitrary sign - whether visual or verbal - with the concept of a referent is the product not of nature but of convention”
“COW”

16. “Denotative” meaning:
Conventional meaning of the message.
“COW”

17. “Connative” meanings:
Implied meaning of the message
“COW?”

18. Bringing Marxism & Semiotics together…
It is at the level of connotation that texts enter into "the struggle over meanings"
Three modes of “decoding”:
Dominant-hegemonic
Negotiated
Counter-hegemonic
Hall’s time: most media content was produced either by corporations or governments. fOf course what’s changed since then is that media is still corporate-owned, but we reate most of the content. So there is more possibility that content itself can be “coutner-hegemonic”, meaning, subversive.
How you will “decode” a message depends on the extent to which you “buy in” to the dominant ideology underlying that message.

19. Close reading (attempt #1)
Options:
Lyrics to “Shake it Off” (
Image of a fly-past from last year’s Superbowl
Johnson’s commercial for moms
News story about Facebook’s solar planes
Drone Racing League promotional video
Restoration Hardware’s kids’ teepee
Identify the most salient “systems of differentiation” (power structures) in the text (race, class, gender, sexuality, ability)
State whether the text itself is ”dominant” or “resistant” with regards to the power structure it portrays
What is your response to this text – did it make you anxious? Angry? Happy?
Explore what the text reveals about your own position in relation to that power structure